Band of Thebes

Born February 3: Gengoroh Tagame, Gertrude Stein, Marlon Riggs

Descended from samurai, Gengoroh Tagame -- 50 today -- is the world's leading artist of gay bdsm manga. Buy his big book, The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame edited by Chip Kidd and introduced by Ed White, which Garth Greenwell reviewed for Towleroad saying, "Even in depicting violence, his drawings have an extraordinary delicacy, conveying extremes of emotion—humiliation, pain, despair, but also arousal, relief and, in one story, heartbreaking devotion—with incredible economy. The essays offered here discuss Tagame’s debt to Japanese woodblock prints, and I found myself marveling at the fine textures of his work, the gorgeous patterning of clothing, floor tiles, landscapes, the hairs on a man’s legs or the sweat on his face." Or get his new book Endless Game. His website is impressively, obviously nsfw. But in person? So sweet. Shown here last year he accepted a handshake then hug from Youth in Decline.

By the time she was four, Gertrude Stein had lived in Pennsylvania, Vienna, Paris, and Oakland. By the time she was seventeen, both her parents were dead and her eldest brother took over the successful family business. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1897 and spent the summer studying embryology at Woods Hole, then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, which she left after two years. In 1903 she moved to Paris where she would stay until she died forty-three years later. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when naming the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Toklas and Stein, a Jewish lesbian after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D. before she was thirty, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at 72. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise. Get the essential Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer. 

Marlon Riggs graduated with honors from Harvard in 1978, earned his MA in journalism from Berkeley, and before long got an NEA grant to make the landmark documentary of black gay culture, Tongues Untied, which caused all kinds of sensations at Berlin, at Cannes, on PBS, and on the Senate floor. A prime target for right-wing attacks, it also won prizes at San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. Riggs' next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. Working on Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.

 

The National Jewish Book Awards

    

The JBC has announced winners and finalists in 19 categories of the The National Jewish Book Awards, including these prizes:

Jewish Book of the Year: Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Fiction: Between Friends by Amos Oz

Debut Fiction: The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert

Biography/Memoir: An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir by Phyllis Chesler

Anthology: 1929: Mapping the Jewish World edited by Hasia R. Diner and Gennady Estraikh

History: My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit

American Jewish Studies: FDR and the Jews by Richard Breitman & Allan J. Lichtman

Visual Arts: Kabbalah in Art and Architecture by Alexander Gorlin

See the full list of winners and finalists here.

Born January 16: Susan Sontag, Francesco Scavullo

Born in New York City in 1933, Susan Rosenblatt [Sontag from her stepfather] came out to her diary at 15, had her first experience with a woman at 16, and married Philip Rieff at 17. Having started at Berkeley, she graduated from the University of Chicago and by 25 she was a divorced mom soon living with the writer Harriet Sohmers Zwerling. Toward the end of their relationship Susan had an affair with Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, who was Harriet's ex. After breaking up with Maria, she lived with Italian aristocrat Carlotta Del Pezzo. Later partners were the German academic Eva Kollisch, Rothschild banking heiress/actress Nicole Stéphane, and choreographer Lucinda Childs. In 1978, twelve years after Against Interpretation (including her seminal essay Notes on Camp), she won the NBCC for her critical book On Photography, teeing up the penultimate irony of her love life, her last and longest romantic relationship was with Annie Leibovitz. Ten years on, in 1999, the world's most famous photographer and America's leading intellectual collaborated on a book unambiguously called Women yet the media still refused to mention the co-authors were lesbian partners. In 2000 Susan finally won the National Book Award (for her fourth novel, In America, less popular than her breakout third, The Volcano Lover) and in 2001, at 52, Annie gave birth to a daughter. In 2004, at 71, Susan died after a decades-long fight with cancer and her obituary omitted Annie. An old-time believer in the "open secret," Susan berated others' moral cowardice yet remained mostly closeted, though she did tell the Guardian she had been in love nine times in her life: "five women, four men." Her As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964--1980 appeared on Thebes' queer lit poll. For another view read Terry Castle's terrific essay "Desperately Seeking Susan" in The Professor.

Because he made a career of pushing glamor toward tacky, with his models sporting his signature huge windblown hair and Way Bandy's way too much makeup, it's easy to overlook the admirable aspects of Francesco Scavullo's sixty-three years as a fashion photographer. After learning the craft from Horst P. Horst, he published his first cover shot when he was still in his teens and he died of a heart attack when he was eighty-two on his way to photograph Anderson Cooper in 2004. The man was a workhorse. Born on Staten Island, his family moved to Manhattan when he was six, and his father bought him a carriage house when he was nineteen, which he used as his studio for the rest of his life. Some of his most memorable images are Diana Ross's b&w cover and full-color foldout for Diana, the Kristofferson - Streisand poster for A Star Is Born, the Julie Andrews poster for Victor/Victoria, Brooke Shields everywhere, the Bee Gees on the cover of Rolling Stone, Madonna on the cover of Time, and Sting in a loincloth. He shot Beverly Johnson for Vogue's first cover of a black woman and Burt Reynolds nude for Cosmopolitan's first centerfold. Scavullo lived for thirty-two years with Sean Byrnes, who not only managed and styled his shoots but nursed him through four nervous breakdowns in his ongoing manic depressive cycles. Among his many books are Scavullo: Photographs 1948-1984 and Scavullo on Men.

 

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [Kindle] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

 

Who brings the funk, noise, and klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. 

Fire Year by Jason K. Friedman

Why are publishers releasing so many good gay books so late in the year that no one can include them in their best of 2013? It's tough for Glenway Wescott's A Visit to Priapus and Morrissey's Autobiography and most vexing of all for debut author Jason K. Friedman's Fire Year [Kindle]. I've just started this collection and greatly admire the author's abundant care and gentle humor in simultaneously converying his characters' inner and outer selves, and his skill with the believable surprising detail. As ever, it's a gift to find someone writing so intelligently about gay lives.

National Book Award finalist and one of The New Yorker's 20 under 40, Salvatore Scibona selected the book as winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize and offers a three-page introduction calling it "candid, cunning, brave, and wickedly funny... Love, lust, religious tradition, the new South, the transcendent promise of faith, the liberating hope of sexual awakening—he twists all of them together here in stories as true to our goofy joys as to our deepest intuitions." 

PW's starred review: "These seven funny, fearless outsiders’ tales set in Savannah and Atlanta—some depicting bygone orthodox Jewish communities, others the rife-with-irony “New South”—gravitate toward taboo. One preoccupation of Friedman’s Mary McCarthy Prize–winning debut collection is the breakdown of traditional mores, but its standouts specifically tackle pent-up sexual desire. In “Blue,” a bar mitzvah celebrant recalls the religious awakening inspired by a plate of veal parmesan that extinguished his “fascination” with men’s bodies; the narrator of “Reunion” finds himself pursued by a onetime high school golden boy, for surprising reasons both friendly and libidinous; and in “There’s Hope for Us All,” a curator discovers an erotic secret behind his latest art exhibition—and another in his personal life. Throughout, Friedman’s warm, lively voice and characters fluently convey the region’s contradictions and just-roll-with-it humor. (The narrator of “Reunion” notes the Confederate flag hanging alongside the American one at a hometown karate tournament, then quips, “The hospitality of Southerners is exaggerated.”) In other stories in which people wrestle with grave religious concerns, Friedman tunes his pacing and diction to the moral issues at stake. Strengthened by the diversity in subject matter, the through-line of sexual coming-of-age and temptation gives this volume a satisfying coherence." 

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

  

Celebrate with the brilliant biography of cultural impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky lover Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 141 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 73, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 79, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 52.

Wise Men

Spoiler Alert. An indie favorite, Stuart Nadler's baggy first novel Wise Men is problematic throughout and freefalls on its final page with a revelation that the protagonist's father, Arthur Wise, and his longtime lawyer partner, Robert Ashley, were gay lovers all along. The decision to withhold the information will doubly perplex readers who have spent 330 pages wondering why the author has chastely ignored the sexuality of the obviously gay Robert. Moreover, the surprise claim that the two men were in a clandestine relationship rings false, exactly like the last-page, out-of-nowhere announcement at the close of Martin Amis' House of Meetings that the narrator was "queer for my brother." As it happens, both novels aim for Big Themes, fall short, and attempt too late to recast their tales in a gay light. Nadler is a serious and thoughtful writer who wants to address major issues: family, race, religion, money, fame, rescue, love at first sight, and the passage of time. He needed a tight editor to help shape his long-winded story of 17 year-old, Jewish Hilly Wise who rejects his newly super-rich ambulance-chaser father Arthur during the summer of 1952 on Cape Cod and instantly falls for a poor black girl named Savannah, whom he can't forget and pursues in Iowa in 1972 and sees again on the Cape in 2008.

After faulting the book's "whopping blandness" and sentimentality, Janet Maslin observes:

As he grows up on the page, Hilly likes to overexplain himself to the reader. “Time does that,” he says, as an older man looking backward; “it kills the mystique, replaces the boundlessness of wishing and hoping with some well-earned, necessary clarity.” Talk kills mystique too, and by some lights Wise Men talks too much about too little. 

A quick internet search yields no answers as to whether or not Nadler is another straight writer whose lgbt characters are queer in name only. He covers every other topic in several likable interviews here, here, and here.

Man Booker International Shortlist

    

Judges of the Man Booker International Prize have broken through from a parallel universe where these ten writers are their finalists for a newish lifetime achievement award given only every other year. You'll note the complete absence of authors who are Spanish, Latino, African, or Arab:

U R Ananthamurthy (India)

Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)

Lydia Davis (USA)

Intizar Husain (Pakistan)

Yan Lianke (China)

Marie NDiaye (France)

Josip Novakovich (Canada)

Marilynne Robinson (USA)

Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) 

Peter Stamm (Switzerland)

Unedited, expat judge Tim Parks said to the press, "Ten wonderful authors, nine of whom I didn't know before I started reading for this prize." Yikes, dude.

If you don't know Yan Lianke, his Dream of Ding Village [Kindle] is an aids novel that was shortlisted for the Asia Booker and his most recent Lenin's Kisses [Kindle] was named a best book of 2012 by The New Yorker, MacLeans, and Kirkus. I was as happy as you when a black woman won the Prix Goncourt in 2009, and last summer Knopf finally brought out the English translation of Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women [Kindle]. Readers of a certain bent may be able to queer their experience of Lydia Davis's novel The End of the Story about an unnamed narrator's obsession with a much younger male ex-lover. And fans of northern wonders Tove Jansson, Gerbrand Bakker, and Per Petterson should certainly seek Peter Stamm's short novel Unformed Landscapes about Kathrine, a woman who has never been below the Arctic Circle until she abandons her husband and son.

The winner of the Man Booker International will be announced May 22.

National Jewish Book Award Winners

  

Congratulations to Joy Ladin, born Jay Ladin, for her trans memoir Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders [Kindle] today named one of two biography finalists for the National Jewish Book Awards. The winner in biography is Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane.

The fiction winner is a contemporary, London-set reworking of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Innocents [Kindle] by Francesca Segal. Widely praised, the novel earlier this month won a Costa Award (formerly Whitbread). The NJBA winner for debut fiction is Daniel Torday for his novella The Sensualist [Kindle] about a 17 year-old boy in the 1990s.

The Jewish Book of the Year is City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, a three-volume boxed set. Fancy.

Read the full list of winners and finalists.

Born January 7: Chester Kallman

In 1939 Chester Kallman was an eighteen year-old blond Jewish kid from Brooklyn when he met W.H. Auden, the thirty-two year-old English, Anglican poet. Auden had thought he would be forever excluded from any semblance of marriage and his joy at finding himself in a romantic, erotic relationship even led him to wear a wedding ring. For a few months. Kallman's inability to stay still and his infidelities wounded Auden, and his naked grief can be seen in every line of his famous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets to a beautiful lad. As Adam Kirsch writes, "The younger man was considered Auden’s inferior in every way by most of his friends, and [Auden's] biographers continue to be puzzled by the attachment. (Richard Davenport-Hines, whose 1995 biography, Auden, is psychologically very acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than that 'it was impossible to be indifferent about' him.)" Despite public fights, affairs, and separations, they were still together in their way thirty-four years later at Auden's death at 66 in 1973. They collaborated on several opera libretti including The Rake's Progress (1951), Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), and Love's Labor's Lost (1973). Kallman published three volumes of poetry, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). Although he remained a New Yorker, they summered in Ischia, Italy from 1948 to 1957, and began spending winters in Athens circa 1963, by which time they had switched to summering in Kirchstetten, Austria. Kallman died in Greece in 1975, two weeks after turning 54. American Thekla Clark was a friend for twenty-four years and wrote a short, clear-eyed memoir about the couple, Wystan and Chester.

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [Kindle] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. Next month he rocks Banff, Calgary, and Edmonton.

Born November 29: Peter Cameron, Billy Strayhorn, Simon Amstell

Not to imply that movie adaptations are the ultimate yardstick of artistic merit but of Peter Cameron's six novels, three have been made into feature films. The stories he tells resonate deeply with other types of storytellers. And with readers. And with critics. The New York Times Book Review said, "The Weekend [Kindle] echoes Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant narrative critiques of material culture open, again and again, to the metaphysical, to that dimension where the known world cedes to mystery." The London Times wrote, "If The City of Your Final Destination were eligible for the Man Booker Prize I would be pressing for it to be on the shortlist. It has all the qualities currently undervalued on the literary scene: understatement, humour, and a dispensing with pedestrian naturalism... it has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of Shakespeare's late plays." The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andorra [Kindle] as "a nearly perfect book . . . a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination." The Toronto Star said Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Peter has also written a play, two marvelous collections of short stories, and in his spare time he publishes extremely elegant handmade books in very limited editions at his Wallflower Press. His ravishing sixth novel, Coral Glynn [Kindle], is a top favorite on this year's queer lit poll. Tuesday night he stabbed my heart with an icicle, announcing two years after finishing Coral he still has no ideas for his next novel.

Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the holy grail of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely de-gays him. We've had the prestigious biography for fifteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

Do you think Simon Amstell knew he was gay before or after he knew he was funny? At fourteen he appeared on a British morning chat show impersonating Dame Edna. The sweetness and malice stuck. Now 32, Simon's humor is sometimes branded "mean" or "horrible." (He prefers "cheeky.") True, he teased Amy Winehouse about her drinking, but as the host of Popworld from 2000 to 2006 he was often criticized for asking famous singers exactly what viewers wanted to know. One "notorious" incident was when Britney Spears appeared on the show long after rehab, court hearings to determine her stability, and public displays of erratic behavior, like shaving her head. Simon asked if she thought she'd "gone a bit nuts?" Britney cried, and people attacked Simon. To closeted Savage Garden singer Darren Hayes, Simon asked, "So, when are you going to come out, then?" Hayes said, "Excuse me?" Simon said, "You're obviously gay. Why won't you come out?" This was cut from the aired version. Hayes calls the incident pivotal in his finally coming out two years later and still refers to Simon as a "total prick." From October 2006 to January 2009, he hosted the comedy quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, winning top category prizes from the Royal Television Society, the British Comedy Awards, and the Broadcast Awards. The Times named the show (during Simon's era) one of the best forty programs of the decade. In 2010 he co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Grandma's House, an award-winning sitcom in which his hapless, neurotic, adorable character, a former quiz show host named Simon, returns to live with his cheerful, middle class family. It's now filming its second season.

Below, John Barrowman challenges him to a gay-off on Buzzcocks and a clip from Grandma's House. Click through for cheekier clips lampooning acting coaches and Ben Whishaw.

 

Telegraph Avenue Continues Chabon's Gay Streak

Isn't Michael Chabon a writer perpetually teetering between impressive bright kid and intolerable showoff for the grownups? His spiraling, tender, funny, overlong new novel Telegraph Avenue [Kindle] admirably tackles race relations in Oakland in 2004 as friends Nat Jaffe (Jewish) and Archy Stallings (black) run indie Brokeland Records threatened by the invasion of a superstore. But then -- Mom! Dad! Look! -- he goes and writes a sentence that stretches twelve pages. Stunts like this, and an unnecessary appearance by Senator Obama, take you out of the characters' lives and remind you you're being entertained by A Very Talented Author Who Can Do Anything He Tries! As Andrew O'Hehir says,"Chabon is not a writer to let one metaphor suffice when two (or five) will do the job, but his style is so joyful and his dialogue so contagious that once I got in the swing of Telegraph Avenue I never minded the florid effusion of verbiage." F.E. of V., indeed. There's also an effusion of cray cray plot and coincidence. Their wives, Aviva and Gwen, run a midwife service called Berkeley Birth Partners, and the men's adorable film geek sons, gay Julius and "not gay" Titus have sex together. (Gwen is unaware of Titus' existence; for a while Archy doesn't know Titus is back in the Bay Area.) If you include the victim in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, this marks the fifth of Chabon's five major novels to feature a prominent gay male character, after: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Marco Roth's Memoir of Closeted Dad Dying of Aids and Its Aftermath

The only child of Central Park West intellectuals, Marco Roth grew up with La Fontaine's fables and Norse myths and a family lie. The story went that his scientist father didn't wear latex gloves in the lab and from a stray needle prick he contracted aids. Not so. Typical for such a literary family, Marco found the truth, that his father dated men, by reading a galley of his paternal aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir 1185 Park Avenue. Thirteen years later, Marco says he started his book The Scientists: A Family Romance [Kindle], out this week from FSG, as an act of revenge against her but it grew into something far more complicated. One review explains, "As part of his puzzling-out project, or as a literary conceit, Roth starts reading and rereading the books his father gave him, including Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Revisiting the classics and a father's secret gay life ought to call to mind Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. If he's lucky.

Born September 19: Brian Epstein

After the Beatles were honored with an MBE in 1965, George Harrison said the initials stood for Mister Brian Epstein. Later Paul McCartney said, "If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian." The gay, Jewish Liverpudlian had been an acting student at RADA with Peter O"Toole and Albert Finney but quit soon after his arrest for "persistent importuning" at a well-known cottaging site. He was 27 in January 1962 when the unknown John, Paul, George, and Ringo signed a contract for Brian to manage them. With zero previous management experience, he developed their onstage look and demeanor, including their collarless German suits and their signature synchronized bow. More importantly, after every major label in London turned them down, he got them a contract with George Martin at EMI's Parlophone. Epstein also managed several other acts, including Cilla Black ("Anyone Who Had a Heart") and Gerry & the Pacemakers. Fans are divided over whether or not his intense relationship with John was sexual; their famous trip to Barcelona was potrayed in the movie The Hours and Times. In August 1967, while the Beatles were in Wales with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Brian took his usual six Carbitral pills to help him sleep but, mixed with alcohol, the dose killed him. His death, at 32, was ruled accidental. That same summer homosexuality was finally decriminalized in England and Wales. Needless to say, Brian did not discuss his gay affairs in his 1965 autobiography A Cellarful of Noise [Kindle $5.99], which clever John said should be called A Cellarful of Boys. For a more revealing look, try In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story [IKindle].

"Good Friend"

Many of you greatly respect privacy in the lives of famous people, like Sally Ride, but this is a blog that loiters at the corner of literature and queer, and it needs to report what's being said there. 

A well-known lesbian / novelist re-posted this photo on Facebook with its original caption, Fran Lebowitz and good friend Toni Morrison out on the town. Her only commentary was to repeat the words "good friend" in quotes. Most readers interpreted this to imply the two writers share more than wild hair and nighttime sunglasses. Others say they're not convinced, asking why the two pictured authors can't both be lesbians but not dating each other. The best comment explores this question about legitmate scholarship: 

"How am I supposed to write about sexual politics in the work of someone who insists this is her 'good friend'? This is similar to the problem of not being able to quote Willa Cather's letters. 'I can't tell you what's really up with TM, but, trust me, something's up with TM.' It's childish."

[Savvy readers, please let me know if FB posts are generally considered public speech and may be quoted in the same way as an author's website.]

Born May 20: Lisa Kron

One of Five Lesbian Brothers and a Guggenheim Fellow, Lisa Kron mixes comedy and tragedy in a way that comes naturally to a Jewish gay girl raised in the Midwest. She says, “…Judaism, you know, is viewed in the Midwest as kind of an accessory that you wear on top of your Christianity.” Her breakout work as a playwright and actress was 2.5 Minute Ride, juxtaposing a visit to Auschwitz with her family's annual trips to an amusement park in Ohio. The play received an OBIE Award, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations, and an L.A. Drama-Logue Award. Her autobiographical work Well earned two Tony nominations including one for her as best actress. Her queer mix of solemnity and laughs makes her ideal for adapting, with Jeanine Tesori, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home as a musical. Do whatever you must to attend the sneak peek performance at the Public in September. A New Yorker since 1984, Kron teaches playwrighting at the Yale Drama School. 

Eytan Fox Revisits Yossi Ten Years Later

Even though of course it ended with the tired trope of one of two young gay lovers dying, Yossi & Jagger was one of the best indie movies of 2002. Now, director Eytan Fox returns to the surviving character, Yossi, a depressed, closeted workaholic doctor who ten years later is still mired in grief. One of the best scenes is his garbled visit to Jagger's parents. Also nicely observed, and cringeful, is this scene of a late night, grindr hookup [top]. Mining another familiar trope, Fox has Yossi brought back to life by the love of a hot young openly gay soldier who reminds him of Jagger. It's easy to see why Yossi is hesitant and repeatedly rebuffs him. The movie is perhaps a little less successful in convincing us why the party boy is so persistent in pursuing the middle-aged melancholic who sits by the pool refusing to swim and hiding behind his book, Death in Venice. After one mournful, tender night of sex, they're already discussing quitting their careers and staying at the tacky resort together "forever"? Oy!

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

 

Celebrate with biographies of cultural impressario Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 140 today, and Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 72, or a memoir by mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 78, or a cd from comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, 51.

Born January 7: Chester Kallman

In 1939 Chester Kallman was an eighteen year-old blond Jewish kid from Brooklyn when he met W.H. Auden, the thirty-two year-old English, Anglican poet. Auden had thought he would be forever excluded from any semblance of marriage and his joy at finding himself in a romantic, erotic relationship even led him to wear a wedding ring. For a few months. Kallman's inability to stay still, and his infidelities, wounded Auden and his naked grief can be seen in every line of his famous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets to a beautiful lad. As Adam Kirsch writes, "The younger man was considered Auden’s inferior in every way by most of his friends, and [Auden's] biographers continue to be puzzled by the attachment. (Richard Davenport-Hines, whose 1995 biography, Auden, is psychologically very acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than that “it was impossible to be indifferent about” him.)" Despite public fights, affairs, and separations, they were still together in their way thirty-four years later at Auden's death at 66 in 1973. They collaborated on several opera libretti including The Rake's Progress (1951), Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), and Love's Labor's Lost (1973). Kallman published three volumes of poetry, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). Although he remained a New Yorker, they summered in Ischia, Italy from 1948 to 1957, and began spending winters in Athens circa 1963, by which time they had switched to summering in Kirchstetten, Austria. Kallman died in Greece in 1975, two weeks after turning 54. American Thekla Clark was a friend for twenty-four years and wrote a short, clear-eyed memoir about the couple Wystan and Chester.